The Avery Review
The Avery Review
The Right to Housing
Perhaps even more so than “design” or “building,” “housing,” as architecture’s slipperiest noun-verb, encapsulates many of the field’s most challenging commands and contradictions. A system that weaves together racialized class struggle, competing approaches to social policy, typological experimentation, politically and materially fraught infrastructural networks, gendered cultural values, intense pressures toward commodification, and basic human needs, housing affects everyone in myriad ways. And yet, in spite of, or maybe because of, this tangled omnipresence, the simple articulation of housing as a right—deserved by and provided to all members of society independent of personal means and identity—has yet to take hold in so much of the mainstream political discourse, much less in bricks and mortar. The essays collected here explore housing’s particularities, asking in different ways what it is that makes this typology so particular and so universal, so fundamental and so contested.